This is a picture from inside my compost this morning. It isn't very pretty. :) The reason there are whole apples in there is because Matt thought that the bag of apples I had on the counter, with which I was going to make a second batch of apple butter today, was compost, so he dumped it in there. (I-love-him-I'm-going-to-kill-him-I-love-him-I'm-going-to-kill-him). And while I might consider pulling them out of the compost, what you can't see in this picture is that my compost is teeming with what appears to be...ugh...maggots.
This is an essay I wrote for my church a couple of years ago, and I posted it on my old blog way back then. I am re-posting it, however, because I used this essay as the basis of a talk I did last week, and some people requested that I posted it here. It's good for me to re-visit this idea anyway, especially in light of the maggots that are currently teeming in my own soul's compost.
I am slightly
obsessed with my compost. A few moments ago, I trekked out in the steamy heat
to the Darth Vader-looking compost bin beside my house, and I dumped in a fresh
bucket of rotting food. Sometimes the discarded food looks almost pretty. Some
days I have bright green watermelon rinds, purple-stained onion peel, or bits
of green and red strawberry hulls. Today, though, the food I dumped wasn’t
really that pretty at all. There were brown egg shells, white cauliflower
stems, some slimy peach pits, and a few yellow, wilting parsley leaves. As I
stood over the bin and emptied my bucket, a sour smell arose from the bin’s
acrid depths, and gnats and flies, disturbed from feeding on the rotting
carnage, buzzed in annoyance around my head.
I suppose I can’t
say that my experience of dumping compost was particularly pleasant, but it was
immensely satisfying, and it was also comforting, for reasons I didn’t fully
understand until a few weeks ago when I spent a little time meditating on my compost
obsession.
Compost, as I am
sure you all know, is rotting food. It’s the stuff that is discarded, ugly,
smelly, moldy, decomposing. Most of us stuff our compostable food down the
garbage disposal or scrape it off of our plates and into the trash. Some of us,
though, are slightly obsessed with our compostable food, perhaps because we
feel some affinity to it.
Compost is, to me,
a bit of a miracle. The bacteria present in the rotting flesh of a bruised
strawberry can nourish next year’s strawberry patch. The vitamins in those
discarded green edamame pods will break down into rich, black dirt that will
make next year’s tomatoes that much sweeter. I know this, which is why, every
couple of days year-round, I lug out wilted spring greens, bright watermelon
rinds, orange pumpkin shells, and the leafy tops of winter root vegetables. And
then, in the spring, I watch as Matt tills the compost into our garden.
It’s amazing,
really. Our trash becomes a treasure. This year, with the rotten food we have
tilled beneath the ground’s warm surface, we our nourishing watermelon,
cantaloupe, sugar snap peas, peppers, tomatoes, basil and various other herbs,
lettuce, beets, beans, corn, sweet potatoes, eggplant, and onion.
This is life. Extracted
from death.
I feel such
affinity with my compost because my soul is just like that compost. It is life.
Extracted from death.
The compost bin of
my soul is even more unsightly than the Darth Vader version we have in our back
yard. It’s ghoulish, really. Monstrous. There is so much that is rotten that I
have tossed into my soul’s compost bin.
Honestly, I don’t
want to tell you what is there. If I tell you, you might not want to visit my
garden. You might assume that the garden of my soul is as wretched and putrid
as that very same soul’s compost bin.
But if I don’t tell
you, then you won’t truly understand the miracle that is compost. You won’t
understand how something so rotten can become so beautiful.
Let’s open the lid
and poke around a little.
Almost daily I toss
in some insecurity and impatience and snarkiness. Sometimes I dump in a lie or
a handful of pride or a sprinkling of gossip. There’s some big stuff in there,
too, that is going to take awhile to break down. There’s the mold of perfectionism I press myself into. Many days I wonder if it will ever really break down into
rich soil. There is also a large pile of ugly things I have said and ugly
things that have been said to me. Then there are some things too painful to
talk about here, really. If you dig deep enough you will find more grief and
shame than I really care to sift through.
It’s ugly in there.
But here’s the
thing: I can take that putrid mess, and I can dump it in my trash, where it
will then go compost in a landfill, but it will not nourish anything but the
trash around it.
Or, I can take that
compost in all of its rottenness and ugliness and stench, and I can work it
back into the soil of my soul, where it can nourish my soul and become
something beautiful. I choose to believe that God, as the gardener of my soul,
will help me till the soil and tenderly nourish the fruit that is all the
sweeter for the garbage that has mixed with the sun and the rain.
Today,
I invite you to visit my garden. Feel free to poke around in my compost, but
also please enjoy the ripe offering I hand you, the sweet fruit nourished not
only by the sun and the rain, but also by the tears, the sadness, and the
shame. And when you go home, take care of your own rotting compost. Work it
into your soul and into the souls of the community surrounding you, and know
that you and God can turn all that is bruised, rotting, and ugly into something
truly beautiful.
